A movement among Indian consumers to force the vendors who depend on their business to actually support their native languages.

As this Times of Indiaarticle notes: From ATMs to deposit slips, withdrawal challans and call centres, most public and private banks feel that service in Hindi and English should suffice their customer base –– Indians who converse in 22 major languages and 720 dialects.

This article is specific to the banking industry, but it’s safe to say that this is the beginning of something much bigger. Linguistically, India has been poorly served by websites.

As I noted in the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, only 7% of the global websites studied support Hindi, followed by Urdu and Tamil. According to research conducted by Nielsen in 2017, 68% of Indian internet users consider local-language content to be more reliable than English. Facebook certainly understands this; Facebook supports more than half of India’s official languages. And it’s no surprise that Facebook now has more users in India than in the US.

Fortunately, some Indian banks are now becoming more multilingual. The Times of India article notes:

Private banks such as ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank are trying to be more multi-lingual in their digital banking strategy. “For instance, the Kotak Bharat app is aimed at financial inclusion. Users can transfer money, recharge their mobile, buy insurance, etc in Hindi, English, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Kannada. We plan to expand the app to handle other regional languages,” says Deepak Sharma, chief digital officer at Kotak Mahindra Bank.

And as you can see by this excerpt from my newly updated IDN poster, India represents a significant diversity of languages and scripts:

Languages are more than a means to an end; they are a sign of respect.

And companies that invest in languages are not only investing in their customers but investing in their own future.

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins released her 2017 Internet Trends report today — the mother of all PowerPoint decks. I last commented on the 2014 deck.

A few slides jumped out at me this year — as part of her in-depth focus on India — noting that 46% of India’s Internet users primarily consume local-language content.

This number if higher than I would have guessed and underscores a point I’ve been making for several years now — the days of assuming you can succeed in India supporting only English are coming to a close.

Google and Facebook got the memo quite some time ago and now support a significant number of India’s 29 official languages. But the question is: When with the rest of the global brands get the memo?

After all, India is now the fastest-growing large market and with plenty of room to grow.

According to the 2017 Web Globalization Report Card, just 6% of the world’s leading brands support Hindi, which is the most popular of the Indic languages. Close behind are Urdu and Tamil.

Amazon is investing heavily in this market, no doubt trying to avoid the many missteps it made trying (and largely failing) to dominate China’s ecommerce market. Did you know that last fall Amazon celebrated India’s Festival of Lights?

India added more than 100 million web users in 2016, more than any other country.

If you have time, check out the full deck. Yes, there are more than 300 slides, but they’re a quick read and I guarantee you’ll learn something. I sure did!

Flipkart has long been the dominant ecommerce retailer in India, but Amazon is no longer content to remain in second place.

Amazon launched its Great Indian Festival promotion this week with free prizes including a number of cars, even a free home.

Just a day in, Amazon claims record sales and one billion hits, which doesn’t really mean anything, but sounds impressive.

Retailers have awakened to the importance of local holidays around the world. Just as retailers outside of China have discovered China’s immensely popular Singles Day, they can’t ignore fall festival season in India.

And this holiday isn’t just about retailers, but any global company. Like Chevrolet, which is offering a free gold coin for purchases during festival season:

To date, there have been 33 internationalized domain name (IDN) requests across 22 languages.

Most recently, India and Korea passed the string evaluation stage with their IDNs. I’ve updated my IDN page to include these new domains.

India is particularly fascinating. There are no fewer than seven scripts used to represent the IDN equivalent of .in (India/Bharat).

In other IDN news, Bulgaria appealed its IDN rejection from awhile back.

Bulgaria had submitted this domain — .бг — but ICANN rejected it, saying it was confusingly similar to Brazil ccTLD: .br.

I’m with Bulgaria on this one.

Finally, efforts are underway to offer IDN equivalents of the .asia domain. Like India, there will need to be a range of language-specific IDNs available, which makes such a launch rather challenging. But I’m told that early stage registrations could begin by the end of this year.